


hell shall break

by Morcai



Category: The Bifrost Incident - The Mechanisms (Album), Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: Blood, Body Horror, Casefic after a fashion, Gen, M/M, Mild Gore, Mystery/Horror, Violence, Yuri is a history nerd, i feel like the fact this is inspired by the mechanisms is a warning all its own, these events have already happened; nothing you do now can change them, what you don't know will kill you
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-18
Updated: 2018-02-18
Packaged: 2019-03-20 14:11:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,743
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13719363
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Morcai/pseuds/Morcai
Summary: The Ratatosk Express, the lost train to the stars, has arrived. It's eighty years late, and only the smoking remains of the engine room, a couple skeletons, and the black box remain.It's the responsibility of Inspector Second Class Yuri Plisetsky, New Midgard Transport Police, to find out what happened.





	hell shall break

**Author's Note:**

> The monster! I bled, sweat and [other people] cried over this one, but it's done, and i'm finally sitting down to scrape it. This 12k+ monster is born from the words "free day" and my own love of the Mechanisms.
> 
> The fic should be comprehensible if you have no knowledge of the album, but I'm not sure that it works in reverse. It is pretty dark, so feel free to hmu over on [tumblr](https://boycottromance.tumblr.com) if you're worried about any particular content warnings.

_This is Inspector Second Class, Yuri Plisetsky, Edda Division, New Midgard Transport Police. As you might know, the Ratatosk Express has just arrived, eighty years late. There’s nothing left of it but the ruin of the engine room, and a couple warped skeletons. And the black box._

_Reconstructing what happened was as much history project as police investigation, and so of course combing through the data came down to me. So listen up, because, no matter what you think, this matters a hell of a lot more than anything you’re doing right now._

* * *

The moment Yuri walks into work, he knows something has happened. That’s mostly because his boss snaps “Plisetsky!” before he’s even managed to close the door behind himself.

As soon as he locks eyes with her, she gestures and says, “My office, now.”

Yuri doesn’t get the kind of jobs that start like this. He’s barely over one hundred years old, he’s been working with the NMTP for less than five years, he doesn’t get the kind of work that makes his boss pounce on people the instant they come through the door.

That doesn’t stop him from following Lilia to her office. She’s not the type to be disobeyed.

“The Ratatosk Express has just arrived,” she says, the moment he closes her door behind him. “We need you to reconstruct why it took this long.”

Yuri blinks, taken aback. The Ratatosk Express vanished into the Bifrost eighty years ago, taking with it not only Odin, leader of Asgard, but also every other high-ranking Asgardian. Two hundred years of Asgard’s dominance over the nine realms, erased in an instant, when the train didn’t emerge on schedule.

“Why me?” He asks. “There are a dozen other Inspectors in Edda with more experience–”

“Plisetsky,” Lilia says, and her yellow-green eyes are piercing. “Why do you think I hired you?”

Yuri blinks, taken aback. “Because I’m  _good_  at it,” he says, and Lilia shakes her head, before folding her hands together.

“The NMTP doesn’t generally hire history graduates, you must have noticed. So why you?”

He shrugs, a little at a loss, and Lilia nods sharply, before reaching under her desk and pulling out a slim volume with simple blue and white cover.

Yuri knows what it is. He just didn’t realize Lilia had a copy.

“ _The Bifrost Incident: Theory, Fact and Urban Myth_. By Yuri Plisetsky. This thesis,” she says, tapping it with one finger, “contains some of the most cogent arguments about the mechanics of the Bifrost I’ve seen outside of things written by career academics. And your analysis of the human factor was incisive and realistic. When you applied to the NMTP, I decided I wanted your mind for Edda Division, working on our cases where we have the least reconstructable evidence. You don’t get caught up in fancy, but you still pay attention to  _all_  of the facts.”

“So you’re giving me the  _Ratatosk_  investigation?”

Lilia arches a brow at him. “Is there anyone else in the Yggdrasil system who knows it better than you? Aside from maybe an ivory tower type or two from Vanaheim?”

Yuri takes a deep breath. It’s what he’s been waiting his whole life for, if he’s being honest. The return of the lost train between the stars, the chance to find out the  _why_  behind one of the most famous disappearances in recent galactic history.

Yuri has always been obsessed with  _why_.

He lets the breath out.

“No, ma’am. No there isn’t.”

Lilia gives him an approving look. “The black box is in your office. It’s damaged, so you’ll have to do your own data extraction, in addition to the analysis. Take your time. Do it right. You understand me?”

Yuri nods.

“Then be about it,” she says, and turns back to the work on her desk. Yuri swallows, trying to control his shining excitement at the assignment, and heads back to his own office.

* * *

The black box sitting on the evidence table in Yuri’s office is more than just “damaged,” It’s as close to destroyed as he’s ever seen one. Dents and dirt are common, sometimes a bit of scorching, but this—one corner of the bright orange box is completely crumpled, and the paint is seared and blistered almost to unrecognizability. There are dark stains at the base and corners, as though it’s been sitting in a pool of some liquid, possibly blood.

Yuri really hopes it wasn’t blood.

He rubs his face, pulls out the roll of his tools, and gets to work. It’s been a while since he’s done a memory board recovery himself, but he still remembers how it works, and all of his instructors said he had a delicate touch. He’s going to need it, to get the boards out without damage.

The time slips by, turned liquid by the focus that Yuri needs to finesse the boards from their battered casing. It’s not  _easy_  work, of course it isn’t. But it’s the kind of terrible, tricky puzzle that Yuri’s brain has been trained into for years. It’s like stretching his brain back into its best, favorite shape, like the adult version of the metal puzzles Yuuri always gave him to play with.

He doesn’t stop until the boards are all fully extracted, marvelously, perfectly, intact.

Then he forces himself to drink an entire bottle of water, choke down cold soup out of the can, and passes out face-first on his office couch.

* * *

The next morning he feels like a zombie until approximately halfway through chugging his first energy drink, at which point he promptly scrapes his hair into a bun, scrubs his hands down with the recovery solution, and gets back to work.

With the extraction done, he still has to clean the boards, and re-house them in a new memory interface. It’s not nearly as difficult as getting them out of the black box was, but that doesn’t mean it’s  _easy_.

By the time he’s done, his phone has been shrilling it’s “go eat lunch, moron” alarm for almost fifteen minutes. He hadn’t noticed.

Closing up the memory interface’s casing is the work of minutes, and then he sits down to crack his back in earnest.

Then he grabs his phone, keys and wallet and heads out the door. He hasn’t consumed anything but energy drinks and a can of cold tomato soup in the last thirty-six hours. He’s  _not_  going to the cafeteria.

* * *

When he gets back to work, food in his stomach and an expensive latte in his hand, Yuri sits down, carefully labels the new memory interface with his case’s details, and then hooks it up to his computer.

It takes a few minutes, as always, for the interface and computer to decide to speak to one another, but it happens in due time, and Yuri begins to look through the data the black box stored.

As it turns out, given the eighty years that the black box was active, there are  _petabytes_ of recordings to go through. There was a camera in every single car on the Ratatosk express, usually more than one, and all of them recorded for eighty years, and sent the recordings to the black box.

“Fuck me,” Yuri mutters. “ _Fucking_  fuck me.”

Trying to pull up data from one of the cameras from midway through the date range gets him nothing but errors from corrupted data, and Yuri snarls to himself.

Of  _course_  this couldn’t be simple. Fine. He’ll go through this chronologically as best he can. Statistically speaking, most disasters happen at the very beginning or very ending of a journey, and the Ratatosk was only supposed to be in the Bifrost for a little over seventy-two hours. Three days of data. That’s all he has to reconstruct, all he has to go through. The earliest files are the least-corrupted too, so he might even be done with the initial report sometime this year.

Yuri cracks his neck, then his fingers, and starts working.

The first recording the black box has is Odin’s launching speech. He’s elegant in gold and warm browns, the bronze patch over his missing eye burnished to a high sheen and his long hair tied into a sleek tail. The train behind him is brilliantly gilded, inlaid with bismuth mosaic, an ostentatious monument to the expense Odin had not spared.

Yuri watches the speech, and isn’t impressed. Odin had, at the moment the black box recorded him, been ruler of Asgard for over a century, but his speech is far from coherent. He rambles endlessly on about the glory of the train, about a destiny intertwined with the Bifrost, and it makes Yuri’s lip curl.

He was young when the train vanished, not yet even twenty, but then, his family’s always had strong opinions about Asgard’s tyranny over the nine realms. Some things are in the blood, as his grandfather would have put it, and getting snarly over Odin Allfather of Asgard is one of them.

At the very least, the speech is short.

The train launches minutes later, and Yuri watches the meter readouts from the black box carefully, though he’s not sure what he’s looking for.

The speedometer steadily ticks upwards, reaching speeds just in excess of two hundred and fifty miles per hour for a moment, as the Ratatosk’s tracks engage. And then all of the readings start to go weird. The odometer can’t tell how far the train has moved or if it’s maybe just standing still, resulting in an ever-shifting flicker of numbers. The speedometer is similar, the numbers changing impossibly for several seconds before the meter simply shuts off.

Sighing, Yuri flicks to the external cameras. Unlike what he’s seen of the internal ones, the externals are only black and white, but they somehow still manage to convey an all-too-real sense of the nauseating, ever-shifting hues and tones inside the Bifrost.

There’s clearly nothing useful to be gained from them though, which makes Yuri sigh again in exasperation. Making some notes for his report, he saves everything, backs up the petabytes of data from the memory interface to his personal drive, and drops the drive in his bag. It’s still early to be clocking out, but he’s still tired from the data recovery, and Lilia told him to take his time.

He goes home, sleeps, dreams of the careful, manic interconnections of the black box, of the terrible beauty inside the Bifrost.

* * *

It’s easier to begin the next morning, without his spine screaming from a too-late night on a ratty couch, and with real food in his body, along with half a pot of coffee.

Setting to work, Yuri flicks through the cameras, trying his best to refine damaged images, to pick out anything that’s survived the corruption. There might have been cameras all over the Ratatosk, but not much of the footage seems usable. Whatever destroyed the train cars, and left the engine room a burned and twisted ruin, it’s done something nearly as bad to the black box, and Yuri thought those things were supposed to be  _impenetrable_.

He’s certainly never seen one with damaged data, let alone data this close to utterly destroyed.

But Yuri is a genius, he’s the youngest Inspector in all of Edda Division, he started fixing shit like this before most people he works with knew it could even  _exist_. He rebuilt his first corrupted database before he was twelve. This won’t be what beats him.

Slowly, the snow and static clear from images. Audio comes back even slower, crackly and difficult to parse in places, but there.

It’s there, because Yuri is the fucking  _best_.

The first day is the easiest to reconstruct, and Yuri rubs at his temples once he gets a look at the mountains of recovered data. He has a  _lot_  of video to go through.

He grabs an energy drink from the stash he keeps under his desk, drinks half of it before pausing for breath, and starts reviewing.

It’s a tedious slog. There are hours of data, at least one recording from every car, though some are nothing but snow. Still, on the video that does work, there are easily dozens of people who don’t look happy to be on the train–every Asgardian of rank was on the maiden voyage of the Ratatosk, unwilling to risk Odin’s displeasure. But none of them look nervous, out of place, or angry enough to sabotage the train.

Odin, unnervingly, is spending every spare second staring out the window of his observation deck, at the nauseating display of colors inside the Bifrost. But while he certainly doesn’t seem entirely comfortable, he also has no motive for keeping the train from arriving in Midgard. This was supposed to be his proof of concept, after all. His legacy.

Yuri rubs at his his forehead. He’s already pulling more overtime than he should. Extracting, cleaning and re-interfacing the memory boards took a day and a half on it’s own. After that, it took hours just to reconstruct even the first day’s worth of recordings, and he’s been staring at them so long that when he looks away from his monitor, there are snowy, staticky flickers at the edge of his vision.

“Just one more camera,” he murmurs to his dark office. “Just one more.”

The next camera is one of the ones that records a private compartment. Yuri hates these—he’s done a lot of research on the Bifrost Incident. He’s done a lot of research on the people on this train, in these recordings. Some of them—Tyr Minako Okukawa, Odr Emil Nekola, Frey and Freya Crispino, among others—he almost feels like he  _knows_.  They might be years dead now, but it still feels voyeuristic.

The camera feed comes up, and there’s only one person in the image. Dressed in loose-fitting black, shoulders hunched, fingers tangled in messy dark hair. They pace, back and forth, back and forth, but the camera never quite picks up their face.

Yuri watches them, fingers tapping. He’d like to keep scanning through the data he’s recovered, but this is the first person he’s seen that’s even vaguely suspicious. Tapping a few keys puts the feed on fast-forward, and Yuri watches as the unknown person paces on and on, tugging viciously at their own hair.

And then they whirl to look directly at their camera, and Yuri’s heart stops for a moment, before it leaps into double time.

Yuri might be one of the few experts in the exact details of the Bifrost Incident, but that face is  _infamous_. Sharp brows, keen brown eyes—shadowed with madness now—and a mask that covers him from cheekbones to jaw, patterned with delicate crystals of red, teal and purple on a black backdrop.

Loki.

Loki, who was  _known_  for his association with Midgardian terrorists.

Yuri clicks his tongue, thoughtful, returns the playback to normal speed, and turns to his second monitor. Asgardian records—public and police—are patchy these days, given the way their government collapsed, but Yuri doesn’t call himself a genius for nothing.

It takes half an hour of increasingly complex search strings, and a couple of dubiously legal queries to governmental databases, but eventually Yuri has the details of Loki’s arrest and sentencing pulled up.

Arrested on Muspelheim, one of many suspects caught in a raid, but the only one held. Trialled on Asgard, sentenced to death. Execution, by burning, apparently carried out as ordered. There’s even broadcast footage stored among the files.

Yuri doesn’t watch it.

Instead, he digs through the case file. There’s something niggling at his brain, as he picks through what he could find. Loki’s familial names are missing, as are any relatives–common enough, for criminals. But there’s something else, trying to hide…

There!

Loki’s educational and vocational history is surprisingly difficult to get ahold of, but once Yuri’s pinned it down, it’s  _fascinating_  reading. Loki was educated on four different worlds, and holds advanced degrees at each university he attended. A physics prodigy, a magical genius and, apparently, a talented dancer and choreographer. One of those rare people with both innate scientific gifts and artistic sensibilities.

And he worked on the Bifrost, right at the beginning, alongside Odin and Baldur. Which makes Yuri lean back and watch Loki pace, tugging thoughtfully at his hair.

It might just be that he was raised by people who were always very suspicious of Asgard, and of Odin, but he can’t help wondering. Loki was brilliant, that much is clear from his records, and he was part of the beginnings of the project that eventually created the Ratatosk Express.

Maybe Odin decided he couldn’t lose Loki’s knowledge, not so soon after losing Baldur’s, and swapped out execution for something that kept one of Asgard’s most brilliant minds more intact.

Yuri breathes out, slowly, and watches. Whatever Odin did, to ensure Loki’s compliance, to make use of his mind, it’s clearly messed the man up spectacularly. Looking at the feed, Loki’s stopped pacing, and now is curled into a ball in the middle of the compartment. His fingers are buried in his hair, and he rocks, back and forth and back and forth.

Still, however bugfuck Loki might seem, he’s the best lead Yuri has, so he keeps the feed up and watches it with one eye, while he browses through some of the less-important feeds. He confirms that the camera in the engine compartment never worked, the whole voyage, looks through another couple of private compartment feeds—

And then Loki stands abruptly, snapping Yuri’s attention back to the main feed. Like a marionette jerked to his feet, he stumbles across the room to look at the mirror.

He stares at himself for a long minute and then hooks a finger under one corner of his mask, peels it away.

He goes still at the sight of himself, with the mask no longer covering his face from cheekbones to jaw.

Yuri goes still, too, fingers smashing the pause key. He stares at the frozen image staring back from the mirror—a young-looking man with wild black hair, haunted brown eyes, and features as familiar to Yuri as his own name. The scars around the mouth are new, but Yuri knows who he’s looking at.

The last time Yuri saw that face he was  _young_ , so young, and it wasn’t so thin, those eyes weren’t full of ghosts. Yuri remembers strong, callused hands guiding his across a keyboard, remembers a smile that shone like starlight.

There, in a private compartment on the Ratatosk Express occupied by Loki of Asgard, is Yuuri Katsuki. Yuuri, Viktor’s husband, one of Yuri’s first teachers, one of the tense people who talked with Yuri’s grandfather late at night, when Yuri was supposed to be asleep.

Yuuri, who vanished into thin air when Yuri was not-quite fifteen years old, and never came back. Yuri who vanished, and took Viktor’s kindness with him.

* * *

After that revelation, Yuri can’t watch any longer. He goes home, and sleeps badly, dreams full of Yuuri’s face, the investigative photographs of the engine car of the Ratatosk, Odin’s plastic smile.

When he wakes up, he feels more exhausted than he did when he went to sleep, but that doesn’t stop him from hauling himself into the NMTP and sitting back down at his desk.

He stares at his monitor, still frozen on the last thing he watched the day before. Yuuri, looking lost and confused and  _haunted_ , there on the Ratatosk Express. Captured on the video surveillance of a doomed train.

Yuuri, who is Loki, who was executed  _years_  before the Ratatosk launched, except for how he’s Loki who is on the train, mad and damaged but not dead.

Yuuri who is Loki, who was not executed but could not have survived whatever is going to happen to the train.

For  _years_  Yuri consoled himself that maybe the people who vanished— _Viktor, Mila, Anya, Georgi, Yakov, Marya, Yuuri…—_ could return someday. He solved disappearances, hunted the  _why_  behind the biggest one of all and now the  _why_ is haunting him back.

When he was young, the loss still fresh, he thought that somehow, solving the Ratatosk disappearance, where no one else had, would fix the pain of suddenly losing his vast array of uncles and aunts and cousins. Might bring them back, or at least give him the answer to why they left.

When he got older, he realized that was foolish, but he never really stopped searching for the reason. The reason behind the Bifrost Incident, the reason so much of his family vanished without explanation.

And now, like the most ironic joke fate could play, here he is. Just like when he was not-quite eighteen and bargaining with the universe. If he can solve the Bifrost Incident, he can know what happened to his family.

* * *

“ _What—_ ” a strangled voice near-shouts, drawing Yuri’s attention back to his monitors. Onscreen, Yuuri doesn’t so much as twitch, still staring at his own reflection.

Yuri though, glances across the feed, and there, in the doorway to the compartment, is  _Thor_. He’s all in red and gold, setting off dark skin and darker hair in striking fashion. He’s dressed every inch like the heir of Asgard, every inch the charming man everyone knows will take over when Odin finally steps down.

Right now, though, he looks a little more like he’s been poleaxed. He’s leaning heavily on the door, the master key that must have let him in dangling loosely from his fingers.

“ _Loki_ ,” he says softly.

As he stares at Yuuri, who is still absorbed in his own reflection, anger and betrayal begin to bleed into his expression, overtaking the shock. His fingers tighten into a fist around the master key, and his hand is too-steady on the door as he backs out of the compartment and gently closes the door.

Thor’s reaction is odd reaction for an Asgardian, Yuri thinks. Most of them might be shocked to find Loki alive, that much is normal. But to feel  _betrayed_ , that’s something special.

Then again, Thor, Yuri notices as he pages through the man’s file, has a long and documented history with Loki. Almost raised together, roommates at one of Vanaheim’s top universities, best friends for all the long years of their youth, both Odin’s proteges. Thor wasn’t involved at the start of the Bifrost research, but he was there, when Loki killed Baldur, twelve years after vanishing into the Midgard underworld.

It was the first test of the train, and Loki sent a pair of hijacked missiles screaming through to Asgard. The first destroyed the tracks, setting the project back  _years_. The second caught most of the engineering heads on the project. Baldur was the only death, but Odin lost his eye then, and there were half a dozen other casualties.

Asgardian courts sentenced Loki to die in absentia, and while it took five more years to catch him, the sentence did appear to be carried out. Seeing that Loki wasn’t as dead as it had been claimed seems to have rattled Thor,  _bad_. His file doesn’t paint him as the forgiving type, and it also points out an interest in the law that Yuri wouldn’t have expected from the heir of a demonstrably corrupt regime.

It’s hard to tell, as Yuri follows Thor into Odin’s cabin, whether he’s angry because Loki still lives, despite the death sentence, or because of what’s happened to Loki’s mind.

Finding the correct camera takes Yuri a moment, but when he does, the conversation is already in full swing, and looks  _intense_.

“Loki deserved to die, and he deserved to die in his right mind!” Thor says, already pacing the compartment, studiously ignoring the observation wall.

Odin gives him a condescending look. “He knows more about the Bifrost than anyone alive. His knowledge could not be lost.”

“Listen to reason, for once,” Thor snaps. “With Loki alive, you’re in danger, the  _train’s_  in danger. He would put  _everything_  we’ve worked for over the last  _decade_ in danger.”

Odin looks unmoved, and Thor snarls, inarticulate for a moment before he draws himself back together, straightening his back.

“Either you take care of Loki, Celestino,” he says, and despite the familiar name, the words are bitten off with exceptional precision, “or I will.”

Odin remains still, but Yuri would swear that something ugly flickers across his face for a split second, at Thor’s ultimatum.

“I’m sorry you feel that way, Phichit,” Odin says, light and almost friendly, and then he gestures to one of his guards. “This gentleman will escort you to a private compartment. I expect you to remain there for the rest of the journey. You’ll find an abdication letter laid out on the desk.”

Thor moves as if to say something, but Odin just keeps talking.

“Feel free to sign them at your leisure, Phichit,” he says, still calm, smiling slightly. And then he gestures again, and the guards drag Thor out. The man is hissing something too quiet for the cameras to pick up, but it looks  _vicious_.

Yuri rubs at his forehead, pulls out a pad of paper and one of his pens, and slows the video down. It’s been a long time since Viktor taught him this game, but like all of the lessons he learned as a child, it’s stuck deep.

He pauses for a second, because Yuuri being  _Loki_  means that Viktor can’t have been an innocent, before he rubs at his forehead and forces himself to focus.

He was probably groomed into useful criminal skills by terrorists amid his surrogate family. Fine, whatever. That doesn’t mean he can’t use the skills he was taught to do  _his_  job.

Rewinding the video to the beginning of Thor’s imprecations, he sets it to play again, mouthing along with the man on his screen. It’s awkward, at first, trying to catch the rhythm of Thor’s speech, the way he forms words, to match mouth-shape to sound. Yuri is very rusty at this. It’s been decades since he last sat down to decode someone’s words without context.

It takes several minutes, and Yuri soon has a headache from focusing so hard on his screen. But what he can catch of Thor’s words are damning, as much for the utter seriousness of his delivery as for what he says.

“I swear,” Thor says, with Yuri mouthing along, “you will regret this. I don’t care if taking vengeance leads us to civil war, I’ll burn down this train.”

He looks like he means it.

Yuri taps his fingers, and then makes a note of the words. Thor’s outrage is understandable, but the way it’s directed at the train–

Well, that makes him Yuri’s second suspect, and the first one who could walk the train with impunity, in addition to being significantly less than three-quarters insane. He’s a better suspect than Yuuri just based on those two reasons.

He refocuses on the video he’s analyzing. Odin’s guards are dragging Thor down the hallway, and Thor’s face is masklike with fury. Still, he barely struggles, except for one moment, when he kicks out, in what looks like random anger boiling over.

Except it breaks the door to a passenger compartment. The door to  _Yuuri’s_ compartment.

Well, Yuri thinks, tapping his fingers.  _That’s_  interesting. He starts to pull up some of the forms for his report, intending to get the beginnings of it fleshed out. He’s almost certain it was Thor who destroyed the train, all he has to do is follow Thor back to his cabin, see what he did—

And the feed on Thor cuts out.

Of  _course_  it does. Yuri makes an irritated noise, deep in his throat, and his fingers fly as he tries to reconstruct the missing video, but it’s useless. The data is beyond even his considerable ability to reconstruct.

He wants to bang his head against his desk, because why is  _everything against him_  on this project?

Instead, he pulls up a mosaic of the remaining camera feeds from the first day, and lets his eyes drift. Maybe he can find something that will give him a clue to Thor’s plans.

His eyes flick over the dining car, and the chief attendant’s delicately mocking smile draws a responding smirk of him, before he has to do a double take.

He knows that smile.

Snapping the dining car’s feed to full screen, Yuri picks through the data until he has a clear frozen frame of the chief attendant’s face.

The hair is cropped short, no longer the famous silver banner, and there’s no sign of his delicate mask, but Yuri would  _swear_  that he’s looking at Sigyn, Loki’s partner and, with Fenrir serving several consecutive life sentences on Hel, the highest ranking member of the Midgardian resistance.

More to the point, that’s  _Viktor_. Viktor Nikiforov, who fell in love with Yuuri like lightning from the sky. Viktor, the laughing, useless man who liked to play chess with Yuri’s grandfather, and who taught Yuri to braid, smiling even when childish hands tugged hard in his long hair.

His expression is hard now, his easy smiles clearly a thing of the past, and Yuri pauses the feed, staring at the coldness of Viktor’s eyes, the way his smile slips away the instant Asgardian backs are turned.

Is he on the train for Yuuri? It wouldn’t be out of character for Viktor—Yuri remembers him being endlessly dramatic and endlessly devoted to his husband. But as far as Yuri can tell, there was never even a whisper of a conspiracy theory that Loki had not been executed when he was supposed to be.

Yuri taps a key, and the video moves forward. Viktor vanishes back into the kitchen for a moment, and Yuri rests his chin in one hand, flicking between cameras to follow him. It seems strange that Viktor would choose to play the chief attendant though, if he was trying to rescue Yuuri. There are other positions that would have allowed him more access to passengers who might not be on the official manifest.

And then red hair in the kitchen catches Yuri’s eye, and it all starts to make sense. There, among the cooks, is Mila, who often kept company with Yuuri late at night, talking about how governments might fail or fall. Next to her is Anya, who used to tell him fairy tales while she painted her nails. Flicking back to the main camera for the dining car reveals Georgi, who Yuri remembers mostly for his gentleness and his dramatics, is working the bar.

Those three faces might be the most instantly recognizable, but as Yuri scrutinizes the serving staff, it becomes clear that there are only a few faces he  _doesn’t_  know, either from Asgardian records associated with Loki, or from his own childhood.

He sits back in his chair, blowing out a breath as he pauses feed again.

“It wasn’t a rescue,” he says to himself with dawning comprehension, looking at the frozen image of Viktor murmuring what could be reassurances or instructions into a waiter’s ear. “It was a  _jail break_.”

Even without proof the Ratatosk worked, Odin had gone ahead and built Bifrost stations on  _every_  planet in Yggdrasil. Including the prison planet of Hel.

Viktor’s presence here, somehow, has  _absolutely nothing_  to do with the fact that his husband was never executed. He’s there to  _hijack_  the train, to break Fenrir out of prison.

He is, somehow,  _yet another_  possible saboteur, with his own plan.

Yuri buries his face in his hands and groans.

At this rate, he’s never going to figure out what really happened on the train.

* * *

Eventually, he straightens up, types his newest revelation into his notes on the investigation, and resumes watching Viktor. As chief attendant, he has the run of much of the train, and Yuri watches as he speaks to  _dozens_  of Midgardian servants, who go unnoticed in every department.

And then, passing by the passenger compartments, Viktor spots the splintering on Yuuri’s door. He touches the broken lock, one hand falling to his side as though he’s reaching for a weapon. Suspicion is written clearly on his face as the door swings inwards.

And then he sees Yuuri, and all the wariness and misery melt away in an instant.

“ _Yuuri_ ,” Viktor breathes, and the soul-deep wonder in his voice cuts Yuri to the core. He knows that tone, the way Viktor has always been so awed by his husband, so very much in love. He could be eight years old again, and Yuuri newly-returned from some trip or another, for all the difference he can hear in Viktor’s voice.

Yuuri though, Yuuri flinches and stumbles back from Viktor so quickly that he falls to the floor.

Viktor’s face falls as soon as Yuuri moves away from him, but he’s never been anything but determined. He crosses the room with quick steps, kneeling in front of Yuuri, reaching out with one hand, head slightly tilted, every inch of him as unthreatening as he can make himself.

“Yuuri, what happened—we  _saw_  you die but you’re  _here—_ ”

Yuuri just shakes his head, scrambling backwards across the floor in a flail of uncoordinated limbs for a moment, before he meets Viktor’s eyes and slowly stills.

“What did they do to you?” Viktor asks, and he sounds so hurt, that Yuuri would back away from him. “It’s  _me_ , Yuuri, it’s Viktor. Your  _husband_.”

“I…don’t know you,” Yuuri says, but there’s something soft and hurt in his voice that says he knows it’s wrong.

Viktor reaches out, just barely brushing Yuuri’s cheek with trembling fingers. Yuuri closes his eyes, looking as though he wants to lean into that gossamer-light touch, but he doesn’t move.

“So they did take your life,” Viktor whispers, raw and agonized. Yuuri opens his eyes, and there’s something terribly sad in his face.

Viktor draws his hand back, bowing his head for a moment before he stands up. He turns towards the door, pausing for a moment before he leaves. His shoulders shake for a moment, before he rolls them back and lifts his chin, cloaked in arctic rage once more.

“I won’t lose you again,” he says, looking back at Yuuri. “I swear it.”

And then, his voice gravelly with tears and his expression that of a soldier, Viktor leaves.

* * *

After that, there’s almost no footage Yuuri can find of any of his suspects.

There’s  _not enough information_. Yuri’s good, but so much of the data is corrupted even past what he can recover. The first day has given not just one or two, but  _four_  equally good suspects. Loki, Sigyn, Thor or Odin could have destroyed the train, by design or accident, and he has no way of knowing what happened after that first day. He  _needs_  more data.

The few fragments of later recordings he’s managed to recover are all useless. A couple non-consecutive clips of Yuuri wandering the train, while the other passengers stare. An audio, with no recoverable corresponding video, between Thor and Viktor about gaining access to  _something_ , though they never mention exactly what. A clip that loops at  _least_  three times every time Yuri watches it, of guards dragging Yuuri into Odin’s cabin.

And, most unnerving, a solid ten minutes of Odin’s smiling face, staring directly into the camera in his private compartment. No matter how he digs into the data, Yuri still can’t figure out if it’s a frozen image or not. Given Odin’s increasingly strange behavior over the course of just day  _one_ , though, Yuri wouldn’t be surprised by either option.

He scrubs at his face. He’s been digging through the first day’s take for  _days_ , and he’s spent all morning staring at the few recoverable clips from later.

There are stills he has captured, either for evidence or just as motivation, hanging on his second screen, and he stares at them, chin resting in his palms.

Viktor’s expression of cold rage, barely hidden under a placid mask. Thor’s burning resolve, as he breaks the lock on Yuuri’s door. Odin’s fixed smile. The lost look on Yuuri’s face, as he peeled the mask off and stared at his own reflection.

Yuri can practically  _hear_  them, their agendas and fears, all on a collision course with something  _terrible_.

But he has no idea what happens next.

Sighing again, he leans back in his chair, and blinks in startlement as his stomach growls. Checking the time on his computer reveals it’s been  _far_  too long since he last ate. Energy drinks can only sustain his brain for so long.

The cafeteria at the NMTP headquarters is crap, but it’s cheaper and easier than going home.

* * *

“Yuri,” someone says, sitting down next to him.

Yuri doesn’t move from where his chin is resting on the cafeteria table, arms stretched out in front of him to cradle the largest coffee he can get. He’s ignoring the plate of unappetizing sandwich in front of him, in favor of grumpily observing his coffee. There’s only one person who would sit with him when he looks this annoyed, and while he doesn’t mind, he’s not actually interested in talking.

Otabek just sighs, used Yuri’s fits of temper on hard cases, and pushes the sandwich closer to his face.

“Have you eaten  _anything_  in the last twenty-four hours that doesn’t contain inadvisable amounts of sugar or caffeine?” he asks, sounding faintly exasperated.

“Unnecessary,” Yuri mutters, but he straightens from his slouch and starts to pick at the sandwich.

“If you don’t eat, you’re going to pass out again,” Otabek says, spreading mustard on his own sandwich. “Remember when we were working on the  _Agape_ case?”

Yuri groans and rolls his eyes. “That was four years ago, it was one of my first cases, don’t  _remind me_.”

Otabek raises an eyebrow. “Eat properly and I won’t have to.”

Yuri makes a disgruntled noise and takes a vicious bite from his sandwich.

“What are you working on these days, anyway?” Otabek asks. “All anyone knows is Lilia called you into her office first thing eight days ago, and no one’s seen you since.”

“You’ve read my thesis, you watch the news, take a guess.”

“So she did give you the Ratatosk. I thought so.”

“Win any money?” Yuri asks, gulping down some of his coffee

“A couple bucks. JJ didn’t believe that you were one of the top scholars in the field.”

Yuri barks a laugh. “JJ thinks that everyone here gets by as much on nepotism as he does.”

“Be fair, Yuri,” Otabek murmurs, though there’s the faintest hint of laughter in his voice.

“Fine, he’s good at talking down all the overdramatic assholes we get, whatever,” Yuri mutters, taking another bite of his sandwich. “Anyway, you wouldn’t be able to  _tell_  I spent six years learning this shit by the progress I’m making.”

“Going that well, then?” Otabek asks, a smile ticking the corner of his mouth.

Yuri sighs and rubs at his face. “Pretty much,” he says. “It wouldn’t be so bad if I could just get  _some kind_  of break on the case. But there’s not enough information for me to understand how the Express even  _worked_ , let alone how it might have gone wrong. And,  _of course_ , the black box is corrupted to hell too.”

“So you don’t have any suspects?”

Yuri snorts into his coffee. “I  _wish_. No, I have an  _embarrassment_  of suspects, but no way to figure out who actually did it.”

“So you need to talk to someone who knows technology we don’t.”

Yuri's exhausted brain takes a moment to make the connection, but as soon as it does, he sits bolt upright and turns wild eyes on Otabek. “No, no,  _hell fucking no_ ,” he snarls, “Otabek you  _can’t_  be serious.”

“Look, Yuri,” Otabek says. “I know you don’t like them. But you saw the kind of tech they were carrying. It was all way more advanced than anything we know. If anyone knows what happened to the train, it would be them.”

“I  _hate_  them, Beka,” Yuri growls into his coffee.

“I know,” Otabek says. “But they’re still your best shot at a break in this case. If anyone alive knows something about the Bifrost it would be them.”

Yuri groans and lays his head back down on the table.

* * *

In the end, he takes Otabek’s advice.

Not long after the Bifrost claimed the Ratatosk, a pair of bandits emerged, preying on the political chaos. Everything about them was utterly alien, their technology beyond  _anything_  the Yggdrasil system had ever seen. It took nearly twenty years to capture them, and in the sixty years since, neither of them have aged so much as a day.

The NMTP, and other Yggdrasil police forces have consulted them upon occasion, in particularly incomprehensible cases. They’re a group of amoral, apparently immortal bandits, but they’re also  _very_  thoroughly contained, and when they can be convinced to give up knowledge, they’re exceptionally useful.

Yuri’s spoken to them before, and he finds them to be the most aggravating people he’s ever met. They even beat out  _JJ_.

Entering the high-security block on Hel, Yuri chews on his annoyance as he signs over his weapons, listens to a list of rules and cautions, and is thoroughly searched for anything he might be carrying that would allow the prisoners to escape.

On the other side of the checkpoint, he picks back up the Bifrost memory interface, and walks to the bandits’ cell.

* * *

“Good morning, Inspector Yura!” comes the bright greeting, as soon as Yuri enters, and Yuri has to grit his teeth to keep from yelling, from turning his back and just walking out.

“Giacometti,” he returns, keeping his voice as even as he can.

“And what can we do for you this  _fine_  day?”

“Is it about the Bifrost?” asks Giacometti’s companion–dark and quiet, where Giacometti is bright and loud.

“Uh, yes,” Yuri says, taken aback. “How did you know?”

“Given your  _totally_  unwarranted distaste for us,” Giacometti says, pouting flirtily, “it’s the only conceivable event that would bring you here. Has the train arrived?”

“A few days ago.” Yuri says slowly, and he’s starting to feel completely wrongfooted, like Giacometti knows far, far too much about what’s going on, and he knows far too little.

“Ah,” Giacometti’s companion says, brows raising as he stands from his seat in the corner. “Then we should be going.”

“Uh,” Yuri says, eyeballing the steel walls that enclose the cell, some twenty inches thick, and remembering the several full squads of armed guards he had to pass to get in. “Yeah. Good luck with that. Look, I just need to know. What happened to the train?”

“Well then,” Giacometti says, and there’s an unnerving grin creeping across his face. “We…shall..tell you.”

And then he has a violin in his hands, his partner has a guitar, and he’s singing, and Yuri has never been swamped by fury faster in his life. He can’t even process the sounds, his rage is so all-consuming.

“ _Shut up_ ,” Yuri says, and he doesn’t think he says it loudly, but Giacometti goes still as a snake confronted with a mongoose, music cutting off with a dissonant twang. “No singing. Just  _tell me_  what happened.”

His blood is cold and his head is ringing crystal clear, and he thinks that if Giacometti tries to screw around with him again, tries to make Yuuri and Viktor into a song or a silly story, he’s going to make that death sentence  _stick_.

“If you’re going to be like  _that_ , just watch the black box,” Giacometti says, pouting, but there’s something wary in his eyes, like he knows what Yuri’s thinking.

“I  _can’t_ ,” Yuri says, and some of his agony bleeds into the words despite his best efforts. “The data’s corrupt.”

“Oh, is that all?” Giacometti asks, and he sounds thoughtful. “Masumi?”

“Give it here,” the man says with a sigh, and Yuri reluctantly puts the memory interface that holds the recordings down on the table. It doesn’t look like much–just a grey cube with the case code painted in white on one side–but it holds the last images Yuri has of Viktor and Yuuri. Of his family.

If Giacometti’s man damages or destroys the data, he’s going to  _paint_  these walls with blood.

* * *

On the trip back to Midgard, Yuri cradles the memory interface to his chest. From the limited diagnostics he can do, the data seems intact, seems like it might really be restored.

He chews on his lip the whole time in transit, until it’s raw and bleeding.

It’s late when he arrives back on Midgard, but he has to  _know_. So he makes his way to his office, instead of his apartment, and connects the interface to his computer. Searching up the appropriate camera and time stamp reveals crystal-clear video of Yuuri, jeweled mask dangling from one idle finger, walking out of his cabin and down the train.

It’s an image that he didn’t have before. The data is uncorrupted, and a quick scan shows that, as far as Yuri can tell, it’s all there.

He breathes, finally.

Backing up the data over his previous copy is almost an action more of instinct than thought, and he heads home afterwards, grindingly exhausted from his work, but light on his feet with relief.

His backup drive burns a hole in his pocket, heavy with the weight of  _answers, finally_.

* * *

The next morning is spent skimming through the archive, looking for what went wrong.

And then Yuri finds it, and everything makes entirely too much sense.

The first recording that matters, that  _really_  matters, comes from the locomotive. The camera there never worked, or at least never  _seemed_  to. But now Yuri can see it’s feed, crisp as if it was never missing.

Viktor and Thor are standing in the engine room, staring towards where the Ratatosk’s engine should be. But the Ratatosk does not have anything as innocent as an  _engine_.

Instead, there’s a silver altar, and on it, a young man, small and blond, a single scarlet streak through his hair. His face is familiar to Yuri—he’s a low-level member of the Midgardian resistance, a young man by the name of Kvasir. His name came up in Yuri’s searches of who among the resistance might have made it on the train. But that’s not important.

What’s important is the tangle of tubes and wires and feed lines leading out of him, pumping blood through the eldritch sigils and grooves that line the chamber.

The silver metal is the same as that which makes the Ratatosk’s track, and Yuri can hear it  _hum_ , a soft, unearthly sound, like a far-off chant.

_ai ‘ng’ngah…_

The look on Viktor and Thor’s faces—fear and shock and horror—says that neither of them knew what was happening in this room. They’re frozen for a moment, both of them.

And then Viktor runs to Kvasir, pulling needles and tubes out of him, trying as best he can to staunch the blood seeping from Kvasir’s battered body. Thor leaps past Viktor, throwing switches and pulling levers, seemingly at random, a concentrated frown knitting his forehead as the glyphs and sigils shift, warping into ever-more chaotic constellations.

Then they both stop, heads flying up as though they hear something Yuri can’t.

And then Yuri can.

It’s impossible to tell if it was Viktor removing Kvasir, or Thor fiddling with the controls, but something has gone very,  _very_  wrong.

The walls fall. Not the steel walls of the train, but the walls of false, sanity-preserving reality.

Yuri swallows harshly.

_Y'AI ‘NG'NGAH, YOG-SOTHOTH H'EE-L'GEB F'AI THRODOG UAAAH OGTHROD AI'F GEB'L-EE'H YOG-SOTHOTH 'NGAH'NG AI'Y ZHRO_

All the doors are open now. No monstrous thing hesitates to take advantage of it.

* * *

Yuri doesn’t see the first few minutes of the incursion. He catches the barest first fifteen seconds, and then he can’t help but double over his trash can, vomiting at the sight of colors he shouldn’t be able to see, and geometries that his computer screen can only imperfectly render.

Pausing the feed with a single flailing hand, Yuri spits, and then drags himself upright, reaching for a bottle of water. Rinsing his mouth, he spits the water into his trash can as well, before tying off the bag and shoving the can away from him.

When he looks up again, his brain feels  _bruised_. But he has a job to do, and it doesn’t matter what assault the Great Old Ones make on his sanity, he’s  _going_ to do it. He wipes the back of his hand over his mouth, tightens his jaw and sits back up.

His fingers are shaking as he mosaics the feeds, taking up every available inch of room on his monitors, the better to watch what happens.

Heimdall Seung-Gil Lee is alone in the car closest to the engine room. An engineer, one of the top scientists on the Bifrost, he built the train, with Odin, Yuuri and Thor.

And when a million screaming, squamous things swamp the train, he is, perhaps fittingly, the first to die. Gnashing rainbow teeth tear dark eyes from his head, and his screams of pain echo, bouncing further than they should throughout the train.

He takes too long to die, and it isn’t pretty. Yuri swallows bile, records as dispassionately as he is able, and closes the feed when it’s clear Heimdall is never getting back up.

* * *

Back in the engine room, Thor and Viktor are still staring, frozen in shock and horror, at Kvasir’s crumpled form upon the altar. Viktor’s hands are frantic on the worst of the wounds, but he cannot staunch the flow. Without the train to regulate the flow in his veins, Kvasir convulses, his back arching off of the table, and he bleeds out in just seconds, the blood that once protected and powered the train now just red washing the floor.

“ _Minami_ ,” Viktor says, and the sheer  _brokenness_  of his voice as he sobs Kvasir’s personal name breaks Yuri’s heart. “Minami, what are you  _doing_  here?”

“Celestino,” Thor whispers, staring at the corpse and altar, “what have you  _done_.”

Screams filter faintly into the horrible quiet of the engine car, as Viktor gathers Kvasir’s body into his arms. Thor’s mouth flattens into a line, and he rests a hand on Viktor’s shoulder for a moment, before he turns away.

* * *

In yet another carriage, a star’s dying fury in flesh murders more Asgardians, and it  _hurts_  to watch, in a way that Yuri was not expecting, because as much as disdain for Asgard might be in his blood, he spent  _years_  learning who these people were, what they did, how they loved. Learning to understand them, in order to analyze how they vanished.

Now he’s watching them die, in pain and ignorant of  _why_.

Frey, overprotective twin of Freya, burns almost instantly. No one else is near so lucky. Freya is forced to watch, the worked-gold throat that her twin and Odr built her unable to voice anything, and this is not the worst.

Odr just fades, as though nothing but dream or mist, but the terrible fear in his bearded face, the way he tears at his skin—all of that makes this nothing but  _painful_.

For a moment that lasts forever, Freya begins to weep, but what forms in the corners of violet eyes is not tears. Instead it is blood red and golden, like a final sunset, like the corona of the thing that has killed her brother.

She stumbles against the wall as the train bucks like a dying animal, and the silver and platinum that has etched the walls melts, half liquid, half malice, trapping her close, fusing around her, worming under her skin and into her flesh.

Unfortunately, Yuri realizes, watching as red gold drips down her face, as she blinks and struggles minutely, Freya Sara Crispino is  _not_  dead. Instead, as writhing metal snakes across her face, she is very much alive, and she has no choice but to bear witness.

And witness she does, as the bodies pile up, Midgard and Asgard’s children falling together.

Tyr backs into the car eventually, moving easily across the slaughter-ground, every inch the celebrated dancer and warrior that history paints her. She is chased by Mila, whose face is twisted in a wolf’s snarl, green eyes mad.

Mila carries a brutal pair of chef’s knives, and her skill is evident in Tyr’s many bleeding wounds. But she isn’t entirely unscathed either, and Yuri bites his lip as Tyr gives a single, arrogant salute with the sabre she carries.

And then she proves why the name  _Okukawa_  has been feared and revered across the system for centuries. Tyr is one-handed—though likely not for long, Yuri thinks, because there is a sickening  _something_  writhing at the stump of her right hand—but she is not blinded by fury, and she has decades of experience on Mila.

But Mila is shifting too, jaw reshaping, shoulders twisting. No longer is she a woman with a wolf’s snarl, but instead something that is at once woman and wolf, and more besides.

Even Tyr—master swordswoman, consummate warrior, lethal foe—cannot hold her back as she lunges, abandoning her knives for the visceral surety of her teeth.

But even as Mila’s jaws close around her throat, Tyr flattens her regrown fingers into a blade, and punches Mila’s heart from her chest.

Blood gushing from each of their wounds, Mila Babicheva, alias  _Garm_ , and Tyr Minako Okukawa sink to the floor together, still locked in a deadly embrace.

* * *

On another camera, Yuri can see Odin, watching the chaos, utterly untouched, while Yuuri stares at him, eyes wide, but now free of any touch of madness.

“What—” he whispers, touching delicate fingers to his temple. “I know this—this call began long ago…”

He blinks, eyes focusing on Odin for the first time.

“Celestino,” he says, and there’s a familiar whip-crack to his voice now, something Yuri remembers of him. “What did you  _do_?”

“I’ve done it!” Odin says, as if he cannot hear Yuuri. “Though I never realized my dreams were true—what a fool I was! To think  _conquest_  the purpose of this train.”

“This train is not going to do what you think it will!” Yuuri says, and he’s practically  _begging_. “When we built it—we didn’t understand enough! There’s no protection anymore, we’re–”

“Derailing?” Odin cuts in, turning to Yuuri with a manic smile. “Yes. It’s needed. When you heard the call you ran, but  _I_  stayed. I stayed, and listened when the dream and the void whispered my name.”

There’s something else on the recording, underscoring their conversation, a voice just at the edge of hearing, as though the very void to which the train has opened a window is speaking. Yuri can’t help the feeling that if he listened just a  _bit_  closer, he would find that it is. He would find that he can  _understand_  it.

He clenches one fist. The video feeds before him more than prove that way lies madness. His nails bite into his palms, hard enough to break flesh. He does not listen closer.

“The dream,” Yuuri says, and he’s growing steadier with every exchange he has. “It called and I—I tried to  _stop_  it.”

Odin hums, still so horribly cheerful. “You failed,” he says, like that’s not  _obvious_. “It was in vain, anyway. This,” he gestures to the train, “this was always meant to be.”

Yuuri firms his mouth, shakes his head, and, without another word to Odin, turns away, heading towards the front of the train.

There is a wall of unknown and impossible things from the place between realities before him, lit by the rainbow glow of Yog-Sothoth, Key and Gate through which the train is passing.

Yuuri closes his eyes for one exhausted heartbeat, and then opens them and steps forward into the fray.

* * *

At the front of the train, Thor— _Phichit_ , Yuri thinks, because it’s clear no one is getting out of this, and they deserve to be remembered kindly by someone—Phichit has an engineer’s hammer in his hand, a grim look on his face, and a spine like a steel rod. His face is still as he tears through a wall of flesh and teeth, claws and wild, staring eyes.

Eventually, he emerges into a carriage near the middle of the train, where the fighting has already passed. Now, despite the blood and the bodies, it is almost-peaceful in its emptiness.

From the other direction, Yuuri emerges, into the silence. Across the twisted carnage that fills the hall, he and Phichit lock eyes. Yuuri stops dead, and Phichit comes to a stumbling halt, staring at him.

“You,” Yuuri says, and his voice rasps a little. “I know you.”

Phichit bites his lip, swallows convulsively and nods, a single sharp motion of his head

“Thor.” Yuuri sounds the name out slowly, like he’s not sure of the way his mouth fits around the syllables. “Phichit. We were—friends.”

“Yeah,” Phichit says, and his voice is rough with the tears that are cutting clean tracks through the grime on his cheeks. “Yeah, we were once. When we were young. And—” Phichit swallows again, opens his arms slightly. “Now? In the end.”

Yuuri’s shoulders hitch on a sob, and he practically throws himself into the offered arms. Phichit wraps his arm tightly around his friend, pressing their cheeks together in a desperate embrace.

“Where are you going?” Yuuri asks after a minute, drawing back.

“Vengeance,” Phichit says, rolling the wrist of the hand he holds the hammer with. “Celes—Odin can’t get away with this. I won’t let him.”

Yuuri flinches, making a wounded noise deep in his throat. “I should—”

“No,” Phichit says, somehow gentle in the midst of the horror, raising his free hand to touch Yuuri’s cheek. “No, Yuuri. Find Sigyn. I know he’s here—try the engine car. Odin’s hurt you enough. I’ll handle him.”

Yuuri draws several shuddering breaths before his shoulders roll back, his posture turning royal. He takes two steps towards the door Phichit entered the car from, and then turns to look at Phichit.

“Viktor.” Phichit looks back at Yuuri, head tilted in question at the non-sequitur.

“Sigyn,” Yuuri elaborates. “My husband. I call him Viktor.”

Phichit’s eyes go soft, and he smiles slightly.

“He’s a good man, Yuuri,” he says. “Go. Find him. Die in peace.”

Yuuri’s mouth wobbles for a moment, before he tightens his jaw and nods sharply to Phichit.

“Die in honor.”

And then they turn their backs on each other, and walk away.

It doesn’t take being a genius for Yuri to know that they will never see each other again.

He has a split second to choose which camera to flip to, who to follow, and oh gods, he is _not ready_ to see his family die.

* * *

He follows Thor, out of the empty car, through battle after battle, until the hammer, so incongruously large in Phichit’s slender hands, is chipped at the head, caked with multihued blood and gore. By the time he reaches Odin’s carriage, Phichit is stumbling, limping from where somethingY—uri couldn’t catch what—slashed across one knee. It’s only one of what must be hundreds of wounds, but Phichit does not fall. Instead, he kicks in the door to Odin’s cabin, and steps through.

Inside, the thing that once was Odin  _laughs_.

His body has grown long and serpentine, his one eye has ballooned to take up most of his face, twisting other features away from it like an image manipulation gone badly wrong. Bronze and copper scales are slowly forcing their way through his skin, blood running down his body. He has been transformed by the touch of the gods he served, unknowingly and so well.

“What have you done?” Phichit says, and there’s something  _hurt_  under the fury, and it makes Yuri blink for a moment.

But it’s there in the files, isn’t it? Phichit Chulanont and Loki were practically raised by Odin. Loki more as a young protege, but Phichit was both student and near-son.

“I have given our people  _apotheosis_ ,” the monstrous, serpentine creature in that room says, triumphant. “The touch of godhead, the gaze of those to whom we are less than nothing.”

“You  _knew_  this would happen?” Phichit snarls, and that hurt is wearing deeper, but the rage is mounting too. “You planned it?”

“No,” Odin says, but he doesn’t sound sad about it. He sounds like he wishes he  _had_ , and that almost makes Yuri more nauseous than any alien geometry of the incursion. “When first I built this train, I had no idea where the songs I dreamed of would lead. But oh, we are here, and when we reach Midgard, the old gods will follow.”

“You’re  _insane_ ,” Phichit says, and hurt is bleeding into rage until they’re one and the same.

“Sanity is meaningless here,” Odin says, shivering slightly, body shifting and elongating somehow, in a way that does not have any sane connection to conservation of mass. “I am become the serpent who shall poison land and boil the sea. The land shall freeze as Yog-Sothoth beckons us hence, the one whose voice I heard when first we built the tracks so long ago. All shall know my rule to be the last, and none shall survive my reign!”

Phichit lifts his chin, readies his hammer, takes as balanced a stance as he can manage, given his wounds. He looks smaller than ever, against Odin’s monstrous bulk, a bloodied image of final defiance.

“No,” he says, simply.

“Killing me will not save your worlds,” says the thing that once was Odin.

Phichit bares his teeth in a bloody snarl.

“ _I don’t care_ ,” he says, and when he moves into battle, Yuri can see the dancer he was trained as on Vanaheim.

It’s a whirl of sinuous flesh, spraying blood and elegant footwork. Phichit is good,  _excellent_  even, but wounded as he is, this is not a fight he can win. For every shallow wound he inflicts, Odin returns with something five times worse, slamming Phichit into walls, smashing bones, once even goring the man with the spike that tips his tail.

Something though, something catches his eye. Yuri only notices because whatever it is makes Phichit pause long enough to take a staggering blow to the head, a blow he should have dodged or ducked.

Still, he smiles, and it’s startling—a cheery grin out of place in the horror of his situation. If it weren’t for the blood Phichit spits on the floor, that stains his smile a ghastly red, it would be the perfect image of one of the smiles from Phichit’s personal social media from before the incident.

And then he takes nine dancer-graceful steps to the massive glass wall of Odin’s observation deck.

It’s then that Yuri notices the small sign, and the jeweled hammer in a case by the glass.

_Any Window With A Hammer  
Is Also An Emergency Exit._

The sound of breaking glass is crystalline, like the windchimes that are all Yuri has of a long-dead father.

Phichit is still smiling, cheerful and now a little mad, when the wild stellar wind rips into the train, and claims them both.

* * *

Yuri freezes the feed. On it, blurred a little by motion and eldritch energy, there is Thor Phichit Chulanont’s savage grin, Odin’s monstrous still-writhing form dwarfing him, the two limned in bloody blue light, as they fall into the nightmarish churning rainbow of the Bifrost. The frozen image still seems to move, lazy swirls of color shifting behind the drifting bodies.

He just needs a minute. He needs to breathe. In a minute, he’ll find all the cold words to lay this out how Lilia wants it _in—cisive, realistic_ , she said.

Right now, though, his throat is full of tears and he feels scraped clean inside with grief. He never knew the people he has seen die, never knew Phichit especially, but.

But he is the only person in all the universe who knows what these people faced, and how they died.

He breathes, and remembers them, lays Asgardian names beside Midgardian in the litany of the people he has lost:  _Tyr, Mila, Anya, Thor, Georgi, Marya, Freya, Frey, Kvasir, Odr…_

And then, when he has finally listed the names of the dead, he sits up, swallows his tears down harshly, and keys back to the end of Phichit and Yuuri’s strange meeting. This time, he follows Yuuri, as he leaves.

* * *

Unlike Thor, Yuuri does not have to fight his way through the train. Instead he walks quietly, untouched by the chaos that has enveloped it. The squamous, screaming things that the incursion brought with it flee before him, as though they recognize the scars he bears.

Finally, he reaches the engine room, where Viktor is kneeling, cradling Kvasir’s head with bloody hands, his fingers leaving new red streaks in blond hair.

Yuuri enters the compartment on quiet feet, and lays a gentle hand on Viktor’s shoulder.

“Viktor…” he says softly, and while Viktor’s shoulders relax instantly at the sound of Yuuri’s voice, he doesn’t look up from Kvasir’s face

“I told him to run,” Viktor says, and his voice is rough. “I told him to run and hide, and that I’d be back for him once we were done here. I didn’t hear from him for  _months_  while we infiltrated, but. You know how it is, I thought he was fine.”

“Oh,  _Viktor_ ,” Yuuri says, leaning to wrap his arms around his husband’s shoulders. “I’m sorry.”

Viktor runs a gentle thumb across Kvasir’s cheek, leaving a dark smear behind. “I was supposed to protect him. I took him on after you were—after the execution. And I  _promised_  I would protect him.”

“You can’t keep those kinds of promises in our line of work, Viktor. You know that. All you can do is try your best.”

“He was your student. He was all I had  _left_  of you, but for Yura,” Viktor says, and his voice breaks. “And I killed him.”

Yuuri sighs, reaching over Viktor’s shoulder to gently close Minami’s eyes.

“Odin killed him. You tried your hardest to make sure he’d be safe.”

“And it wasn’t  _enough_!” Viktor snaps, the sharpness of his voice ringing off the walls of the train. His arms tighten around Kvasir’s corpse, and Yuri’s breath goes shallow, and he slams a pause on the recording.

It’s easy to forget that these events are long over, with how present they seem. But they are, they were  _eighty years ago_ , and the twenty year old in Viktor’s arms is only a few years older than Yuri was then.

_…all I had left of you, but for Yura_ , Viktor said.

Yuri breathes heavily, swallows the knot in his throat, furiously clears tears from his eyes. He needs to  _see_. He can’t let his feelings get in the way.

_Fuck_ , it’s good he’s been reclusive about this. If Lilia knew how emotionally compromised this case was making him, he’d be pulled so fast his head would spin, top historian in the field or no.

He  _can’t_  let himself be pulled from this case. The victims of the Ratatosk Express, of Odin Allfather’s madness, deserve to be remembered by someone who knows them. And Yuri—

—Yuri deserves to know what happened to his family. He  _needs_  to know what happened to his family.

He restarts the recording.

“Maybe not,” Yuuri says, and there’s a sharpness to his voice that seems to cut right through Viktor. “Maybe it wasn’t enough. Are you going to let that stop you from doing what needs to be done?”

Viktor breathes out, a long slow breath, and looks down at Kvasir’s face, smeared with blood and twisted with pain.

“No,” he says softly. “No, of course not.” His shoulders roll back, and he looks up at his husband. “How do we stop the train?”

Yuuri’s steady expression wilts into something that looks like grief.

“Viktor,” he says softly. “We can’t stop the train.”

“ _Bullshit_  we can’t stop it, Yuuri you know this train better than  _anyone_ , we  _can_ stop it—”

“No,” Yuuri says, and there is something terrible in the gentle firmness of his voice, the glint of tears Yuri can catch on his face, “we can’t. This is  _bigger_  than Asgard, Viktor. This is old gods and older monsters, and things we can’t fight.”

“Then what are we supposed to  _do_ , Yuuri?”

Yuuri steps around Viktor, scooping Kvasir into his arms.

“We can’t stop the train, Vitya,” he says, and he steps into the next car, vanishing from Yuri’s camera for a moment.

When he returns, Kvasir is no longer in his arms.

“We can’t stop the train,” he repeats. “But we can delay it. We can keep the train, the  _engine car_  on the track for as long as we can. Buy time.”

“ _How_?”

Yuuri somehow manages to dig up half a watery smile. “Yeah, well that’s the part you’re not going to like.”

* * *

Yuri watches, and it feels like losing his grandfather all over again, in slow motion and fast forward, as Yuuri explains what they have to do. How they’re going to keep the train inside the Bifrost, keep it from reaching Midgard.

They uncouple the rest of the carriages from the engine, moving around each other in the easy orbits Yuri remembers. It’s the same way they used to wash dishes or put away groceries, always consummately aware of where the other is.

He remembers being six years old and trying to interfere with their synchronicity, six years old and being splashed with soapy water as Yuuri danced around him on the kitchen floor, always ready to take a wet plate from Viktor’s hand, no matter what Yuri tried.

Here, Yuuri doesn’t even look up to take an offered wrench, Viktor explains tricky mechanisms without glancing at his husband, somehow just  _knowing_  what Yuuri is working on.

It’s a complex coupling, and one that Yuri doesn’t think was ever supposed to be undone. But it’s not like Yuuri and Viktor can’t wreck anything they put their minds to.

Finally, the carriages detach from the engine car. Yuri can’t see, with his limited viewpoint, what it looks like when they do, but the way that Viktor reels back suggests it isn’t pretty.

Yuuri, already scarred and savaged by the true nature of the Bifrost, doesn’t even wobble as he stands up, dusting off his hands.

Viktor hesitates, looking up at his husband, as Yuuri examines the machinery of the engine car, flipping a few switches and adjusting a few dials.

“Is there no other way?” Viktor asks, and he sounds like his heart is broken all over again.

Yuuri just shakes his head and turns away from the controls to climb onto the altar, lies down where Kvasir’s blood is still drying, a slick red over sickening silver. He reaches up with one hand to cup Viktor’s cheek, smiling soft and sad.

Viktor’s shoulders hitch, and he leans in to press their foreheads together. Yuri can’t tell from because of the camera angle, but he thinks that Viktor is crying.

And then Viktor sits up, reaches for one of the lead lines that he so recently pulled from Kvasir’s body. His fingers are so tight on it that Yuuri can see the yellow of bone through his skin, even through the slightly-grainy playback of the camera.

His hands are steady and gentle though, when he slides the single line directly into Yuuri’s heart. Yuuri flinches, a whole-body spasm, and Viktor’s shoulders hitch in a sob.

“Don’t cry,” Yuuri says, raising one hand to brush at Viktor’s face. “Don’t cry, my love.”

Viktor’s shoulders are shaking, but his hand does not lose control of the line in Yuuri’s heart, does not stop limiting the flow to the slowest possible drip-drip-drip.

“This time,” Yuuri says, and there’s a faint, sad smile on his lips, “I won’t let you go.”

Viktor leans close, presses a desperate kiss to Yuuri’s mouth, and says, just loudly enough for the recorder to pick up, “I won’t leave you.”

“I know,” Yuuri says, as Viktor draws back just far enough to perch on the edge of the altar, the fingers of his free hand trailing with desperate gentleness across Yuuri’s cheek. “But it’s going to be a long time.”

“That’s okay,” Viktor says, and his voice trembles. “We didn’t have long enough before.”

* * *

Yuri closes the playback. He hasn’t even made a dent in the eighty years of recordings the black box contains, but he knows why the train never appeared. He knows why nothing but the locomotive emerged. He has the answers he was looking for.

He can write his report now.

Instead, he leans back in his chair, presses the heels of his hands into his eyes, until starbursts bloom in his vision.

It’s been a long week. It’s been exhausting, and changed everything he thought about himself. Everything he thought he knew about his family is different now.

But this. This is a loss ninety years and just minutes old.

He breathes, takes his hands from his face, and tries to remember them all. Sharp-humored Mila and her knives. Georgi, strong and dramatic, willing to act out anything to amuse a child.

The endless patience Yuuri had for a bratty ten year old who wanted to  _know_ , Viktor’s easy kindness, in the early years.

Yuuri’s sunlight smile for Viktor, which remains unchanged after nine decades and the shattering of his mind. The devastating gentleness of Viktor’s hands, which Yuri could only coax out of him rarely in the few years after Yuuri vanished.

The way they looked, Yuuri laid out on a blood-washed altar, Viktor touching him like he was precious, keeping a steady hand on the needle. All of the best things Yuri remembers of them, there in the midst of gore and madness.

Yuri breathes out slowly, and then reaches for his computer. His report isn’t going to help anyone, really, but he has to try.

He reaches for his microphone, and marshals his thoughts. It doesn’t take him long to pull up a NMTP listserv and ready a message that will drop his recording, top priority, in everyone’s inbox. And then, his fingers are flying as he hacks himself into every audio broadcast channel he can find.

Separately, for Lilia and Otabek and the few others he’s close to, he records a concise  _get the fuck out_  message, and sends it with a virus to make their phones blare until they’ve made it at least to the edge of the Yggdrasil system. It’s not going to be enough, but it’s a start.

He can’t wait for anyone, he refuses to be that stupid, but he’ll be _damned_ if he doesn’t give them all the best chance he can.

* * *

_…So, the train has arrived, and it’s only a matter of time. I’ve chartered a small ship, and as soon as I’ve finished this recording, I’m setting out for the Hoddmímis mining system. I’m not stopping there, just going to refuel and keep going. If anyone hears this report in time, I suggest you do the same. Inspector Second Class, Yuri Plisetsky, signing off._

* * *

Yuri triple-checks the ship’s systems, and curls himself up in the pilot’s chair. The course to the Hoddmímis system is laid in, and all he can do is wait, and hope he’s outrun the things that will have followed the Ratatosk Express out of the Bifrost.

Sitting on the console in front of him, the data he downloaded from the Transport Police computers plays in full holo. The sound is muted, but Yuri knows what these voices sound like.

Viktor is still sitting on the edge of the altar, one hand steady on Yuuri’s chest while he gestures animatedly with the other. He’s clearly telling some kind of story, and Yuuri is laughing, delighted.

There are eighty years of recordings, all moments just like this. Surreally domestic moments, laughing conversations, gentle affection, all of them against the backdrop of humming silver metal and slow-drying blood, all with Viktor’s hand stone-steady on Yuuri’s chest.

Yuri watches them, and lets the stars stream past.

**Author's Note:**

> [grins] did you have fun? 
> 
> anyway, comments and kudos are things of beauty and joy forever!


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